nicotine fever
by angels entwined
Summary: On the day she is born, a fluffy white halo of snowflakes clings to the rooftop of her house, and her mother screams when she sees her. "This is not my daughter." AU. —CloveCato, Clove-centric, for Zoey in the HG Secret Santa Exchange 2013 and the January Caesar's Palace Oneshot Challenge! \ "We're all monsters here."


_Title;__ nicotine kisses_

_Summary;__ On the day she is born, a fluffy white halo of snowflakes clings to the rooftop of her house, and her mother screams when she sees her. "This is not my daughter." AU. _—_CloveCato, Clove-centric, for Zoey in the HG Secret Santa Exchange 2013 and the January Caesar's Palace Oneshot Challenge! \ "We're all monsters here."_

_A/N; sorry it's late! Also, that it's so long. Also, there's some minor swearing. P.S. Ages were screwed with._

_Written For__; Zoey (thegirlwhochangesherpennametoomuch)! Because she's both my SS and the challenge judge._

* * *

_The Prologue_

* * *

On the day she is born, a fluffy white halo of snowflakes clings to the rooftop of her house, and her mother screams when she sees her. "This is not my daughter."

It's not quite certain what she means; the girl, with her raven fuzz on her scalp and mousy brown eyes—they'll turn dark in later days, until they are an identical shade to her hair—is most definitely her daughter. There's a little piece missing from her stomach, a purplish hole, that marks the place where the umbilical cord was cut. No, she's her own flesh and blood.

The girl gurgles and smiles brightly up at her mother, yet a strangely menacing kind of smile as Enobaria pushes her away, the woman's face contorting into a snarl as she bares her teeth. It would be comical if not for the sheer /hatred/ in her eyes, the dark glint of bloodthirsty rage. You see, Enobaria Fuhrman is a wild woman with a less-than-cool temper, and while she isn't evil, per se, she can be almost as horrific as she's making out her daughter to be.

[Almost.]

The house is torn to bits in a supernova of a collision as the little baby's face contorts into a snarl just as ugly, just as feral.

Enobaria's instincts are correct after all. This is not her daughter.

[Unfortunately, those instincts do nothing to save her, not when she's barely given birth and tangled in the sheets of her bed, not when bloody, grisly pieces are flying everywhere in a storm of dust and blood.]

* * *

Oh, wait. Rewind.

The same day, the little girl's older sister, Lyme, is out. She's off buying groceries, biting her lips as she agonizes over whether to buy the chocolate chip cookies or the oatmeal raisin ones [over the fact she's distracting herself with sweets while her mother's in labor]. It's decided that the chocolate chip cookies are better; sure, a person who's just given birth should be kept healthy with oatmeal raisin, but after nine months of pain, this is the least her mother deserves.

She smiles at the cashier and attempts to pay exact change, but her fingers shake a little too much, and she slips him five dollars too much. Even though her family lives in one of the poorest sections of the city, she doesn't want to deal with the issue, telling him to keep it. A smile breaks out across his face as he thanks her; he happens to be a citizen of that section, too.

Her smile slips and breaks as she walks home, disregarding the sidewalk and smashing blades of grass beneath her three-year-old boots. It's left crushed and dripping in a curve across her face when she sees the explosion.

Since no one in the wreckage seems to be alive, she dials 911 as the neighbors start to spill onto the street.

* * *

An hour later, after pushing and begging and threatening the displeased police officers and medics, Lyme gets results. Her mother has been legally declared dead at the local hospital, nothing left of her except burnt-out lungs—people always choke before they burn—and glassy eyes. Ninety-five percent of her body is unrecognizable. The midwife is also dead.

The only survivor, reports the sympathetic police officer, is the baby. "It's a miracle," he says with a humorless chuckle, his face awash with ash, eyes unintelligible behind his sunglasses. The sun beats down on the pavement in waves of heat, bringing beads of sweat to her face that mixes and mingles with the beginning of tears. _You will not cry._

[_You are strong._]

"Can I see my baby sister?" Lyme asks, not paying attention at first. She'll wonder why she didn't later; it's right in front of her that something is terribly _wrong. _All she wants is a remnant of her family; after all, her dad left years ago after knocking up his girlfriend, visiting maybe once a year, always ending in slammed doors and Mom's shrill screams and a check on the table to last them another couple months.

The cop says, tilting his head, "Probably in. . .fifteen minutes or so. The doctor's checking her for damage." He clicks his pen and writes something on his clipboard. "Would you like to name her? Her only known relative is those on her father's side, and we've been unable to contact him."

At the mention of her [excuse for a] father, it feels like her heart is tightening and shrinking, but she chokes down the beginning of a sob. _YOU WILL NOT CRY. _It takes her a few seconds to answer. "I—I don't know what to name her."

"Surely _something,_" the police officer presses her, "or else your father would have to name her." There's disgust in his voice; she sees the glint of the wedding ring on his finger, made of solid gold. He's rich, and he has children, and he probably loves them. He doesn't _understand, _though; her father is human. Her father is any other person.

Her eyes water because _damn it_ her _mother is dead and she doesn't know what happened_—she's only _fourteen—Mom is dead_— "Clover."

"Because it's such a miracle she's alive?" the officer asks, raising an eyebrow. He tucks his clipboard under his arm to stare her in the eyes, not rude, but intense.

The girl nods, her hands twitching as they resist the urge to curl into his fists. It's not his fault he assumed that; it makes sense. But no, that's wrong. Patches of yellowing clover had been crushed beneath her feet on the way home, the last bit of normality before she saw the silent wreckage, cut by the bawling of a baby.

[She can't feel anything as she cries, swallowed by in a sea of numbness.]

* * *

_The Story_

* * *

"_She's _a weirdo," people always mutter. There is something wrong about her, like her mother had said before she died. She's no one's daughter. It doesn't help that surviving the explosion-slash-fire-slash-whatever was just too suspicious. She had been a baby, and it smelled of not a miracle sent by God, but by the devil. Not even her fuzz they called hair was singed. Not a burn, not a scorch.

Lyme ruffles her hair affectionately and swallows back the _they have a point_ when Clover fumes over it, never crying, only ranting, saying, "they're _wrong._" If nothing else, at least comforting her little sister isn't expensive or tedious the way it is for some people; she didn't ask for candy to make her happy or throw temper tantrums in public when she was little, and as a teenager, she doesn't need to go to a therapist or harm herself.

What Lyme really thought all those years ago—fourteen, to be exact—is that yes, this isn't Enobaria's daughter, or her own sister. They're all right. At first, she'd pushed it away, the first time she'd held her sister; she's always been a practical person, and while she still trusts her instincts, it's completely silly to feel the urge to throw her sister back into the wreckage and hope she choked on the lingering smoke. But then, the things that had happened over the years: the rumors that no, that boy hadn't fallen off the edge of the playground set, someone had pushed him, or that it wasn't natural for that one cruel teacher to have crashed into a telephone pole driving home.

But no, her sister isn't a murder, and she isn't like the others. She doesn't believe in fate or any sort of higher power or the supernatural.

[Neither did her mother, and look what happened to her.]

* * *

On the day she graduates from eighth grade, Clover hears of a new boy in the neighborhood—the alpha queen, Glimmer, a bubblegum-chewing blonde who has the highest scores in the class but everyone pretends that the shy boy who always places second is the genius, hangs around to tell her the new guy is an entire snack bowl of sexy._  
_

She's seventeen, taller than Clover, and drawls her name like it's an endearment. She's also the closest thing the dark-haired girl has to a friend, maybe because Glimmer is, in truth, really messed up and so is Clover. Not that they're exceptions. "He's sixteen," the blonde says, perching delicately on the family's precious leather couch even though Lyme hates her. "Newbie."

"Why do I care?" asks the younger girl, who has no interest in boys. They're only the other half of the population who torments her just as much, plus the fact they sleep with Glim. Not that Clover cares if she's lesbian instead, but tossing an abused body out the door after a one-night stand doesn't make males seem the greatest, because that's the only kind she meets.

Flicking cigarette ash onto the carpet, Glimmer sniffs; for all the stereotypes, she's never been one to gossip pointlessly. She dislikes rambling. "It's weird. He's a total cutie, but no one seems to like him—I think he's awesome, personally, but there's something about him that reminds me of you."

"Touched. How?"

There's the sound of something dropping in the other room, possibly a textbook, that's undoubtedly Lyme's signal she'll come storming in for Glimmer to get out in thirty seconds if she doesn't leave. The blonde ignores it, braiding her hair absently as she drapes all the way across the whole couch. "_No one likes him._ And he's hot, and even if he's moody, like you, he's not that bad. You're not hot, even, and he is. Also, everyone thinks that he threw his dad down the stairs when he was eleven. They've got a stepdad now, bytheway."

"No one thinks I killed my mom."

Glimmer laughs and tosses her head, a swish of golden hair fanning out across one end of the couch. A half-broken electric fan tries to prevent her beads of sweat from dripping onto the leather, or existing at all, but it doesn't work. "You really think that?"

[_They're lying_, she wants to say, but the words are stranded on her island of a tongue.]

* * *

It's two days later that Clover actually meets this Cato person, even though she doesn't particularly want to. When she stares at herself in the mirror, all she can think is that she _does _look wrong, a little like from a single glance, you can tell what kind of personality a person has, if they have any disorders, what kind of life they're living. She doesn't want to see Cato.

She's shopping at the store for milk and some bread to make sandwiches for lunch that afternoon, pretty much all she and her sister can afford. She stares at the amount of money she's been given, attempting to calculate if she can maybe cram in something nice, but all she can think of is candy and Lyme isn't the type to leap for joy at sweets. Also, she's crap at math.

He's shopping for. . .she doesn't even know. Who meets someone shopping? It's not immediately obvious that it's him, of course, when his back his turned, though she'll grudgingly admit that yeah, he's cute. Ish.

It's when he turns around to face her, snapping for her to move out of the way of the aisle of vegetables that it becomes clear. Because he _feels _wrong. A shiver crawls down her spine, even as she stares at him in disbelief, and he stares back at her for a split second; he's thinking the same thing.

Then everything returns to normal. It's only a second, as she snaps back, "_Make _me," except that's not very smart because he's two years older and has bulging muscles and also he practically gives off this threatening "bad boy" air. Except no, she will _not __be bossed around, _and—

[_Come on, you remember. You were so angry at her. You were her daughter. You wanted to hit her, wanted to teach her she was wrong._

Clover was a _baby. _She shouldn't even have these memories. _Obviously,_ they're not real.]

—"You're Clove," he says; it's a simple statement, but he says it like it's a shock.

She snorts, gathering up her grocery bags. It hadn't even been apparent she'd dropped then, and no one is staring. "No, I'm _Clover. _Clover Fuhrman. If you'll excuse me. . ." She slings the bags across her arms and stalks off to the cashier's counter, even though the girl is snoring and not really paying attention.

Even though she's not paying attention, Cato murmurs, "No, you're _Clove._"

* * *

A week later, she catches the boy in Glimmer's house as they share cigarettes. She's never been able to smoke, not because she cares about being underage—it's just, the glowing tip, the _fire, _the way the ash dissolves like snowflakes as soon as it hits the ground. Her mother died in a fire. Single sparks can change entire buildings to nothing.

A bottle of half-empty whiskey sits on the counter, usually something Clover took a sip of the every now and then she actually went to Glimmer's house. It's rare, as she was usually hanging out with her fellow bubblegum-chewing blonde friends or "satisfying" a client. Most of the time Clover goes there is spent hiding from her "friend"'s screwed-up parents, who spend more time arguing than working.

"Clover," says Glim, taking a sip from the bottle and hanging onto the arm of the boy. "This is the boy—_guy _I mentioned earlier, Cato—"

"I know," she replies, her hand still poised on the doorknob. It slips off the handle, a summer haze of sweat coating her hand.

Glimmer assesses the situation quickly, flicking her gaze back and forth as she drops the cigarette and crushes it beneath her foot. "I suppose you two don't like each other."

"Not quite," Cato says flatly.

"Glimmer, can I talk to you?"

[She storms onto the porch in a cloud of dark hair, sniffing the air. As Glimmer breathes, the smell of whiskey drifts through, polluting the oxygen molecules. "_Why is he in your house? _You've dated guys before, but the only ones I've seen in your house in the evening are either eating dinner with your family like they're all close to each other and fantastic with emotional bonds, or they're in your bedroom. He's not going to pay you, and you aren't dating him."

"How do you know he isn't?" the seventeen-year-old challenges, leaning against the railing of the porch. The wood is scarred with initials of _GR_—Glimmer Rambin—and some random initials of some boy, trapped within a heart. It's easier than carving it into a tree.

Clover laughs, even though it's not funny at all. "Your lips aren't swollen."

Glim lets out a catlike, almost comical hiss, her fingers digging into the unrecognizable initials _MQ. _"Fine. It's just—Clove, he reminds me so much of you it's scary."

"Clover."

"No, Clove," she replies, sounding like she's parroting Cato. "Because you're not _lucky. _At all. And he's not either. He told me that his mother tried to arrest him for killing his dad. But he didn't, Clove, he _didn't!_"

_Clove,_ love with a C. She hates the very idea of it. Clover is not _love, _and she cannot see love, or life, or anything properly except in television technicolor, like supernovae, like broken bodies and the scent of blood in the air. _You're not supposed to remember the day you were born. You were a baby._ "I hate nicknames." _Lovelovelove—_

"Fine," snaps Glimmer. "Just know that you should really talk to him."]

Cato waits inside the house, his ear pressed against the door as he grinds his heel softly against the cigarette he's dropped onto the carpet. He can hear every word.

* * *

She storms home, and blacks out at some point.

When she wakes up, she's in her home, safe and sound; her sister hovers over her, explaining she'd found her crumpled form on the sidewalk.

[Why are her knuckles bruised? Is that the sound of sirens in the distance?]

* * *

At six the next morning, she and Lyme have an argument.

"Oh my God, Clover, what _happened_?" shrieks her sister, red-faced as she blocks the door. All the younger girl wants to do is make it past her and jog through the streets. No, not jog, _run, _until it feels more like she's flying on the ground. She wants to _run. _"I'm fucking working two jobs just to put food on the table and you leave and you're _unconscious on the sidewalk?"_

Clover inspects her knuckles, still swollen and black; she wonders how the punch had landed, if it had broken any bones, but last night is nothing but a haze. Who had she fought with? Glimmer? Cato? Had she just punched a telephone pole or something to take out her anger? No, she's not the type to fling knives at a wall for a stress reliever.

[The sound of ambulance sirens and blinking redwhiteblue strobes still haunt her.]

She lets Lyme take it out on her, all the stress, all the nights of holding back tears, all the times she slammed the door so hard it shook in the frame after a bad day at work. The woman deserves it; she's twenty-eight years old, had her barely-visible future snatched away as a teenager, her mother is dead, her limited hopes of college are crushed (she'd been a _genius_ in school, had even had a chance of going) and her father hasn't showed up since her little sister was born.

[_It's all your fault, _Clove. _This is what your love does._]

But then a line flies out at her— "I can't keep doing this! Do you know that people get suspicious? It happens, and I don't know what to do, and I can barely afford a doctor when you wake up all healthy and fine from a blackout _right after something bad happens_!"

"This has _happened before?__"_

The expression on her sister's face catches, morphs into _Oh, shit. _Her arms drop to their sides, and she's so thin from years of hard work—thin, but muscular and strong—that Clover has just enough room to slip out the door.

She runs.

* * *

_Glimmer.  
_

_Glimmer, are you okay?_

* * *

She has no idea where she's going, but eventually, she becomes absorbed in nothing but running. She's the person standing as far away from the surf as she can while waves beat against the shore, beat against her mind, and she resists even as her heart pounds against her ribcage. She really might explode.

It becomes apparent that her subconscious destination is Glimmer's, where a woman she recognizes as Mrs. Rambin is shouting at a nosy reporter. "No, we don't know what the fuck happened to our daughter!" she screeches shrilly, her hair disheveled, its golden color fading into a grayish yellow. "Find the bitch who hurt her!"

Of course, it becomes obvious almost immediately that _the bitch _is Clover, who nearly crashes into the mailbox. It doesn't help that it's painted pink, chipped and fading from when Glimmer was little. _Glimmer. _Her throat tightens, and she swallows as Mrs. Rambin whirls while the mailbox quivers. "There! There she is! She assaulted my daughter!"

"We also have reports of another person in the house, a sixteen-year-old by the name of Cato Ludwig—"

"Arrest them both! You can't trust them!" Mrs. Rambin snaps, disregarding the reporter to fix her burning gaze on Clover. "Never! Don't trust any of them!"

"What happened to her?" Clover asks, disregarding the words, because suddenly she doesn't care. She may be a shit friend, whether she hurt Glimmer or not, whether the blonde was a shit friend too, but she's never going to be Mrs. Rambin.

"Dead."

She is falling, her palms scraping against the hard sidewalk.

"_What?_"

* * *

Clover is brought to the station for questioning, but she can't get over the fact she may have killed her friend. _She's lying, _she thinks numbly, staring at her hands, turning them over to inspect the backs. The nails have crescents of dirt beneath them, and her knuckles are still bruised, but are they the hands of a murderer? There should be blood on them, blood that breaks the skin and spills everywhere, not just a couple drops here and there.

Half an hour later, Cato joins her on the bench as they wait for police officers to question them. He's relatively silent, watching her with mild interest as she inspects her hands, but mostly apathy. There's no remorse in his eyes, either.

Finally, she decides to risk it, knowing no one's watching except maybe the security camera, and it'll be a few moments before anyone can crash through the door shouting for them to stop talking. Leaning over, she whispers, "Who killed Glimmer?"

Cato stares at her with haunting eyes; even though they're lighter than hers, the color of the sky, the irises look pale and washed out, like fading stars, just before they explode. "You're one of them—I mean, one of _us._"

["But don't worry, Clove," he adds, staring at her unsettled eyes. "We're all monsters here."]

* * *

The interrogation takes several hours, is full of attitude and snark from both of them while she tries to hold herself together, and has a police officer with a coffee mug filled to the brim and circles under his hazel eyes. A black cat coils around him and rubs against his arm while trying to sneak a bite of the cinnamon bun he's holding. _Aren't black cats bad luck?_

Finally, her older sister arrives, bless her soul, even though she's no saint. Not that Clover is, either—in fact, murder's a crime, and no saint does it. If she believed in a higher power, she'd think her soul was surely damned, and who knows, maybe there is one.

_Clover, you're overreacting. Maybe it's normal, maybe you just have a really psychotic disorder that causes all this._

That makes her feel _so _much better.

"You're her legal guardian?" asks the police officer, looking wary, and she suddenly realizes Cato's family isn't anywhere in sight. She resists the urge to run to Lyme's side, having never done it before.

Lyme nods briefly before opening the door and stepping aside to let Clover out; she has to stay behind, to promise that no, she won't get in future trouble, yes, this is serious, yes, her sister will probably have to come back for future interrogations, yes, she might need to see about a therapist (though the last one's a lie, since they can't afford therapy).

She glances back at Cato, who is expressionless.

* * *

The summer solstice is spent locked inside the house, face pressed against the window as she pleads to go outside and run until her lungs stop functioning, _please_, but everyone always stares suspiciously at her. One time, a woman drew her kids inside her house and locked the door with an audible _click_ when she was walking by. She has a feeling if this was a past century, she'd be burning at the stake right now.

At five AM, she watches Lyme slip off to work and lock the door. She's about to toy around with it with maybe a bobby pin or something—not that either Fuhrman wears them often, and her mother had never been particularly girly either, a tough, snarling woman who had made only the mistake of having children—but as soon as her fingers touch the door, there's what resembles the sound of clockwork falling to pieces, and the door opens.

Also, it falls out of its frame.

Well. She winces at the loud _thud, _then inspects the doorframe. There's wisps of smoke rising from what looks like what had been their broken doorbell, and the whole thing smells odd.

"_We're all monsters here,_" echoes Cato's voice.

She trudges off to the nearest gas station for a phonebook and his address.

* * *

There's only one Ludwig family, although some kid has scribbled in _Van Beethoven _between the lines in spiky handwriting. It's maybe a few blocks from her own home, a ten-minute walk, maybe. She chooses to run.

Cato is found lingering outside his home, eyes fixated on the house window. He has a cigarette between his lips, blowing haloes of smoke into the air and leaning against the porch railing. His eyes flick downwards upon seeing her; why is he so _tall_? "Hey."

"What do you mean at the police station?" she demands, just as there's an audible crash inside the house. Predictable. She wonders how many marriages in this section of the city are actually happy, or how many marriages there are at all, since getting a license costs money. "'We're all monsters here.'"

"That's what they think we are," he says, raising an eyebrow at her petite figure. Clover's always had a habit of appearing tiny but deadly, when her irises are completely black and anyway, the smallest things are the most lethal. They hold poison, see?

She feels uncomfortable, like the temperature in the air is rising. It shouldn't even be possible for it to get hotter during the summer solstice in the city; she can practically hear the mercury bursting out of its thermometer. "Then what are we?"

"Gods," he says, flicking ashes off his cigarette, and fishes a spare, rather bent one to offer to her. She walks close enough to smell the smoke on his breath; it all seems grisly and ugly suddenly, even though Glimmer had always done it for her clients because it looked sexy and provocative. It doesn't. It seems more like it's going to burn out his lungs and swallow him in oceans of ash until he is only black and white and gray. _We're gods._

She refuses it; at least she is alive with colors, or even just skepticism. "That's a little arrogant. Our universe is not geocentric. It's not about us."

"Look," he says, breaking the tense, almost formal atmosphere. Suddenly, he looks like the average delinquent-slash-smoker-slash-teenage-kid in the neighborhood. "If you could—if you _can_—do this. . ." He flicks his hand upwards, and something much larger inside the house crashes. There's a shrill scream, probably his mother's, and then a small, low moan.

Clover stares at him in disbelief. "What did you _do?__"_

Sparks drift through the air like fireflies. "He's not _dead. _I actually need my stepdad, y'know. He keeps the money flowing."

"But you hurt him!"

Cato yawns, watches the sparks as he stops leaning against the railing so he can stand up straight. There's a lazy grace to him, like a wild cat's, and he replies, "And the asshole deserves it. You try."

"_Fuck _no—"

The screaming is reduced to a whimper. There's a sound of a body collapsing onto the floor.

"See, Clove, we're gods. We can do anything."

[She's running again.]

* * *

_We are not gods. We are monsters._

* * *

She finds him a month later, and he says only, "I'll teach you."

Lyme hasn't let her talk to anyone; all she receives is suspicious stares, and as she reflects, all she can think of is the cold gazes, the names—_freak, witch, psycho_—the accusations, Lyme yelling at her. Years and _years, _for something she couldn't control.

"Fine," she agrees. "Only because I want to control. . .whatever it is." She wants to never hurt a friend again, even though this is purely hypothetical and she doesn't have a friend anymore. Glimmer was the only one who wasn't superstitious enough to avoid her.

[Something inside her thirsts for revenge, you see? But shh. She doesn't know yet.]

* * *

Lyme is a stubborn woman, but eventually, she gives up and lets Clover venture outside. Besides, school's going to start in about a month, and she'll be entering her freshman year. Chances of her going to college are slim and she's probably going to drop out as soon as she can, but her sister is stubborn about it.

Most of her summer is spent with Cato, who teaches her what she is. They lie on the dying grass of his backyard as he talks, hidden in the shade of a scraggly apple tree. "We're immortal, I've heard. Once we graduate from college, about, and we don't talk to parents who don't keep track of us, we stop aging."

It only adds to the god-like thing. Clover would like to be a god. "There's others like us?"

He nods, his fingers splaying across the grass as he plays around with it. The tree dips down toward them as if by magic; maybe that's what they are. Magic in its purest form. _Twisted to do ugly things,_ is the reminder. "I've heard of them, in code names. Cashmere's one. Finnick, too. There's more of us, scattered across the world."

"Have you traveled?" she asks skeptically, thinking that it seems unlikely, considering he's as poor as anyone else here. Then again, the fact he's managed to move at all. . .hardly anyone here moves around, because they can't afford it, trapped in some dingy one-story or an apartment complex for the entirety of their life.

He nods as the grass droops around them, and his eyes are feverish, as if he's absorbed the energy. "We wasted most of our money on it, although nowhere fancy, like Paris," he says with a dry chuckle. "Then. . .Dad happened."

Her lips are firmly pressed together; she doesn't want to know if he really killed them. She knows that whatever she has—_it's a diseaseplaguemutation it's _wrong—makes them stronger and faster, born to run and fight, but she doesn't want to turn into him. If only she knows what _him _is; after years of playing around with his power, drinking it in, he seems like nothing more than a silhouette filled with it. He seems like a black-and-white photograph, all scraps of humanity gone.

_You're not scared._

She still has color. She's still human.

* * *

[_Dear, don't you know that's your event horizon? You're being sucked in until there's nothing left._]

* * *

When school starts up, she hasn't blacked out, from what she knows, but then, she hadn't known before. How many of them had she had, with Lyme biting her lip and deciding not to tell her sister? Had she _killed _before?

It occurs to her she still doesn't know who killed Glimmer.

Anyway, she feels a little better now. She can almost call Cato her friend, even though he stares at her in a way that completely says _I'm judging you. _"Clove, ditch school." The _C _is almost not even there, the _love _dragged out. She ignores the heavy emphasis; each time he says it, it's like saying _I love you, _where Clover just means _good luck. _Not that he's ever said either. "It's not worth it."

"It's the first day," she snaps, and anyway, her sister will go crazy if she doesn't attend any time she's not either suffering from illness or a relative has died. Neither happen frequently, or at all. It scares her to know why she doesn't get sick. "I have to."

"I'm not going," he drawls, having turned seventeen over the summer and believing he's not going to go to college anyway. She's fifteen now, having grown about a tenth of an inch—her growth spurt was years ago—and still disappointedly short. "Screw school. I want to spend it with you."

Her eyebrows jump up, which is rather unfortunate; it is one of her little features, along with the tan in the summer that gives her freckled nose more emphasis, that makes her look ridiculous. "What, getting mushy?" The idea of this person liking her. . .well, really, he's still cute, but her friend is still dead and she's been drifting apart from her sister after the interrogations, and she doesn't have _time._

_"Skip," _he insists.

"No." Then, "I'll skip tomorrow."

* * *

They spend the next day walking&running for about an hour or so, until they make it past the outskirts of the city and into the woods. She knows how pissed Lyme is going to be, but for once, she doesn't give a fuck; when she's around him, she feels free, like she can do whatever she likes. She really does feel like a goddess. He's not black-and-white; he is color, hidden because of eyes that process a limited spectrum. Clover hears about butterflies, how they can see all these colors humans don't.

She's a butterfly, all beautiful with kaleidoscopic wings, and flying. Even if she hates girly things.

They share a bottle of whiskey and carve into their initials into a tree, _CH + CL, _until they blend together and it looks like something from the periodic table. She giggles, light as air, and the forest dances around them, branches waving, tangled in each other. It's as if the sound intensifies, the chittering and chirping of animals louder and more distinct. It's a forest of magic.

"Don't get too high on it," he warns her. "There's a crash." Still, there's a little smile as she dances around, watching the greenery bend to her will.

They kiss. His lips taste of nicotine and ash. She feels alive.

[They don't notice as she absorbs the forest's energy, as it crashes from its own high and dies.]

* * *

When she comes home, she notices Lyme's waiting for her. Holding the door open, even.

It takes all of two seconds for her to pounce, rage on her broad, tanned face as Clover crosses the threshold of the house. "Where the hell _were _you? I thought maybe you'd had another blackout, that maybe someone _died, maybe you_—and I heard that you'd skipped school today! On the second day! What were you _thinking?__"_

Clover feels like she's just been given a burst of oxygen, surfacing from the ocean for the first time in her life, only to be dragged right back down. Lyme is the brick, the weight, partly because she's the only one left she still cares about. She wishes she didn't.

[She wishes she was like him, who didn't care about anything or anyone but himself and maybe her.]

"Screw off," she snarls back, instead of only taking it, letting her sister yell at her. Her face turns tomato red. "I wanted _one day off. _One day off from all the teasing, the bullying, the names. The 'she killed her best friend.' The 'she hangs out with a freak.' I wanted to be free with him, wanted to—"

"Him?"

"Cato," she blurts, and realizes the way the name rolls off her tongue does sound like she thinks he's a god. _We're all monsters here. _That's what her sister thinks. "The boy I've been hanging out with all—" _Summer, _she's about to finish.

"The other murder suspect," Lyme verifies.

Clover says nothing.

Her older sister's nails dig into her arms as she crosses them over her chest; she practically reeks of intimidation, but this is her little sister. Neither of them are going to back down. "Your new best friend is a boy three years older than you who is thought to have _killed your old one._"

"Two." Clover's face flushes, but she stands her ground, meeting her sister's gaze. "He's not what you think!"

"Our mother thought that!" The mention of a mother only rubs salt in the wound; it feels as if they are suddenly surrounded by dead people no one is over. Lyme grabs Clover's shoulder and she's shaking her, and this isn't about skipping school anymore, this is about so much more, and she's still shaking her—

—something creaks—

—oh, God, _what is that_—

The chimney has collapsed on top of her.

"Lyme?" Clover whispers, and without even thinking, pulls off the bricks with only her mind. There's a large bump on her sister's forehead, and her breathing is shallow; the bleeding is probably all internal. "Oh, God, _Lyme._"

It feels thick in her mouth; isn't she a goddess? Why does she even say that? "Lyme."

She feels frantically for a pulse, a heartbeat. Her sister has stopped breathing. She's alone.

* * *

In the dark of nighttime, she finds Cato, even as she can already see the redbluewhite strobes blinking in the distance, hear the sirens' song. _Come back. After all, don't you want to see your family one last time? _Then, _you will not cry, because you cannot feel. _There's only an icy, burning numbness in her heart. If she has one, anyway.

She pulls the door out of its frame as quietly as possible without knocking, which is not very quiet at all; it's eleven PM, and she can't wait. Flitting upstairs, she looks around, wondering which room is his.

_It's so dark, _she thinks hazily. The only color is the strobes flashing in the distance. It's all she can see, engraved into her irises, a gory tattoo that will always be there.

She luckily gets his room on the first try and rouses him. "Cato, we have to leave—"

"—Hey." He stares up at her, the moonlight reflecting against his pupils until they look glassy, like he's dead; he hadn't been asleep. Is he really alive? Is he _human? _Her world is falling apart, the horizon frayed, the seams pulling at each other. The smell of smoke lingers in the room, like _the day her mother died, it wasn't a random fire, it was really you. _He seems oddly composed.

"Tell me. Who killed Glimmer?"

He takes her clammy hand, turns it over; there's still crescents of fresh dirt beneath it from the day in the forest. "Me, in a way."

Her mouth drops open in horror.

"Not like that," he says matter-of-factly. "I mean you punched her, and you don't know your own strength, Clove. You're a goddess." _Monster, _echoes the word. "You just kept at it. And she was nearly dead, but at the point you'd stormed out, so. . .mercy kill, I suppose."

"_What?"_ she shrieks, not caring if his parents hear, not even if his stepdad comes in with a shotgun. "But. . .did you even _care_ about her? She could've been healed!"

"Look," he says. "Did it sound like her parents were willing to pay the medical bills? No, they wouldn't. They let her daughter fucking _prostitute herself. _I'm not _that _evil." Before she can continue, he says, "What are you here for, breaking into my house?"

He doesn't see the colors in the distance or hear the sirens' song, the one that wants to lure her to death, or at least a mental institution. No, she's not going to go there. No, his world is all gray and hers is painfully bright. All she wants to do is lose herself in that forest high again, before she crashes; it's anesthesia from the rest of the world.

_He _is anesthesia.

[So why is she so disgusted?]

"I killed Lyme," she says. "We have to run."

Cato doesn't react—_why doesn't he care?_—only takes her hand, and they run. It's not as exhilarating as it should be.

* * *

_The Epilogue_

* * *

Clove Rambin pushes the frosted, paper snowflake-covered door open as winter sweeps through the city—a new one, she's only been here for two weeks—having just gotten a haircut that makes her hair look all curly and a new set of contacts. They're bright green, the same color as the eyes of the person whose surname she took.

The Starbucks is alive with activity—a barista smiling flirtatiously at a handsome customer, a whir of machines as another coffee is made, a man in the corner hunched over his MacBook Air, typing away. There's something about coffee that she likes, how wonderful it smells yet how bitter it tastes. It's something you have to get used to.

[Like Cato, she supposes. Not that she had a choice.]

She's technically twenty-five now and certainly looks it. It seems as if the entire world has changed in those ten years, maybe because she's finally left that poor, run-down section of the city she lived in. Now, it looks impermanent, all glowing neon signs and makeup-caked faces. Humanity is subject to change, she realizes.

It's sort of beautiful, the pathetic attempts at paper snowflakes glued to the windows, the flow of pedestrians on the sidewalks. But it still doesn't seem to be _her._

Cato's waiting for her in the corner; he has a forged ID claiming him as Alexander Fuhrman, having taken her name. "It's really not practical to visit your mother's grave," he says, seeing how pale she looks in the cafe's fluorescent lights. "How'd it go?"

"I met the daughter of the midwife who got killed," she replies automatically, then realizes that's not really how she wanted to say it. She takes up a fork and digs into the slice of chocolate cheesecake they're sharing, all intricate designs and swirls.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Her name's Katniss Everdeen, and she has a little sister named Primrose. She's in her twenties, and working like crazy so Prim can go to college. Prim's eighteen." Clove laughs humorlessly; funny how when she finally accepts her name, there's no love in her left. Her soul is nothing but city decay. _Lyme, Lyme, Lyme. _

She's still running, but Lyme is everywhere.

Cato is lost in apathy, not really caring, only curious. He's older than her emotionally. Ten, fifty, a hundred years from now, they won't feel anything at all. Not him, not her, not any of the other people that might be out there.

Unless it's a lie, she supposes. They're only rumors. She hopes so.

_These are the people we call gods._


End file.
